Guilderland’s graduation ceremony, held on June 24 at the University at Albany’s sports arena, focused less on platitudes about marching boldly into the future, and more on the importance of speaking the truth and of being brave and empathetic.

Superintendent Marie Wiles said that her idea for her speech came to her after a dramatic catch by her son, Ben, in a baseball game, when he ran toward a fly ball, glove outstretched, and managed to catch it to end the inning. The announcer even said, “Great catch in the outfield by Ben Wiles!”

The next day she asked her son if he had told all his friends about it. He had, he said, but they hadn’t believed him. Her son said, “I wish people couldn’t talk unless they were telling the truth,” and she agreed: Life would be much less complicated if people were physically incapable of saying anything that wasn’t true.

That experience prompted her to speak about truth, saying that graduates should insist on it and hold onto it as a constant amid all the change to come in their lives. They should speak it, and they should be “scrupulous” in their efforts to find it.

“Tell the truth, seek the truth, and when you find the truth, face it head-on,” she said.

A song followed, by soprano Marissa Scotti — a high honors student headed to The College of Saint Rose — accompanied on piano by honors student Meyer Nam, who will attend The New School. Scotti sang “Laurie’s Song” from Aaron Copland’s opera, The Tender Land. The song is sung by a character about to graduate, looking out at a life about to change dramatically.

Scotti’s rich and soaring voice no doubt spoke for many in the auditorium when she sang: “I’m strange inside. The time has grown so short, the world, so wide.”

“What do you feel?”

The graduate speaker was Sagar Kumar.

The district does not recognize a valedictorian or salutatorian, and students who wish to speak go through an audition process. This year, Lutsic told The Enterprise, 9 or 10 people auditioned. All of the highest-honors students — those who have a grade-point average of 95 or above — sit on the stage.

Kumar said that he had always thought that the role of a graduate speaker was to be a “hype man,” but that he would like to set aside any questions of the future and “take a moment to look around.”

“What do you see? What do you feel?” he asked.

Kumar said that his math studies had left him with one simple realization: Time is change. At this point in a graduate’s life, “There’s so much changing, and that’s a little frightening,” he said.  

But time is also what makes life so valuable, Kumar said.

He asked students to look around at the faces, beaming with pride, of all the people — teachers, parents, friends — who had supported them through their high-school years and to thank them.

“This moment in our lives will only happen this once,” he said.

It is fleeting moments, Kumar said, that sum up our existence. So, we need to be sure we are present in the present.

Kumar urged his fellow graduates to, “instead of being afraid, be amazed.”

He described what he saw as a perfect society, and said it was one in which “everybody had the empathy to understand, and the courage to act.”

“Be the most courageous and empathetic person you can in each moment, in order to build the best future possible,” he concluded.

“Make life a contact sport”

Bernard Bott was the speaker selected by the students. He is a librarian at the high school, and one of the research coordinators for the school’s E=MC² Symposium, an independent course explore their own interests through rigorous research.

In introducing him, Andrew Hines said that Bott’s disposition “radiates intelligence,” but that he can easily talk with any student who comes into the library. Bott has, Hines said, “left hundreds of students wondering how a librarian can be so cool.”

Bott talked about growing up with the current graduating class — he started at Guilderland four years ago, he said, adding, “We were freshmen together.” He talked about how both the seniors and he himself had grown alongside one another over those years.

He said that he has made a point of always listening to students and urged them to go out into the world and do the same. “Listen,” he said, “and you’ll become aware of all the connections that make life a contact sport.”

Bott received a standing ovation for his speech that included many inside jokes about things students had said and done over the years.

A total of 410 graduates received diplomas from Wiles and board of education president, Christine Hayes.

All of the other musical interludes at the event were by the Jazz Ensemble. Students filed out at ceremony’s end to the ensemble playing Mike Tomaro’s “Say What You Mean.”